Cynthia Liem recently gave a TedX Delft talk called "Every bit of it". I have the pleasure and the honor of being her colleague at the Delft Multimedia Information Retrieval Lab. I missed being at the talk in person, but finally found time today to watch it on YouTube.
What she
is saying is so critical---it at the same time both fresh and timeless---that the
talk deserves a more in-depth reaction than a tweet or re-tweet. This
post summarizes the message that I heard in Cynthia's talk.
Cynthia
makes the point that every bit on the Internet has meaning to the
original person who put it there. These are of course, multimedia bits,
that she is speaking of videos and images that have been captured by
people and shared on the Internet. An important question in this era of
Big Data: each of these "bits" of multimedia is captured by someone for
some reason. Cynthia tells us that we can add worth to these bits by
enhancing them with other bits; in particular, she shows us wondrous
transformations that can be brought about by adding music to video.
Towards the end of the video, she says that a big question that with face with multimedia is "What is relevant?" http://youtu.be/ykkXdjr0rfI?t=14m1s
She
points out that we tend to focus for the obvious in our understanding
of relevance, e.g., popularity and quality, and that because of this
focus, we miss material that people do not know exists.
Instead,
the "bits" of multimedia on the Internet should be seen as an entrance
to the world, not as the final product, but a place to start. A diamond
in the rough that needs to be polished in order to add value.
At the end of the video, she asks the audience to keep their eyes open for a rediscovered hidden gem....I discuss my gem in my next post: http://ngrams.blogspot.nl/2013/03/multimedia-readymades.html
